Split Views About Bitcoin Among NYC Real Estate Brokers

NyPo reports:

The bitcoin has gained a foothold in one of the hottest business sectors in the country: Manhattan real estate.

Bond New York, a Manhattan-based real estate broker, has started accepting the digital currency for real estate transactions, The Post has learned.

Bond New York believes it is the first real estate brokerage firm to accept bitcoin.
“Real estate brokerage is a service industry,” said Noah Freedman, a co-founder of Bond New York. “Our job is to make real estate transactions easy for our customers. Bitcoins are just another mechanism to help people facilitate transactions.”

Several larger real estate brokers are not sold on the idea and have no plans to set up bitcoin accounts any time soon.

“We don’t accept them, and we have no plans to accept them,” Pam Liebman, CEO of the Corcoran Group, said Friday. “We prefer the American dollar.”

“Bitcoins could be here today and gone tomorrow,” Liebman explained. “How do you trade them? Can you walk into Barneys and pay in bitcoins? What happens if people decide not to accept them anymore?”

Howard Lorber, President and CEO of Vector Group and chairman of Douglas Elliman, a Vector subsidiary that is the largest real estate brokerage in the New York area, agreed.
“We’ve never had anyone ask to use them, and we wouldn’t accept them,” Lorber said.[...]"What happens if people decide not to use [bitcoin] anymore? I don’t know why anyone would use them,” Lorber said.

Further, I imagine that  Bond New York is immediately converting bitcoins it receive into dollars, which means it considers Bitcoin something along the lines of an American Express travelers check, rather than a separate money. I guarantee you that Bond New York is not pricing properties at a fixed Bitcoin rate. No one is thinking in terms of Bitcoin. Those who are accepting Bitcoin are doing a conversion in their head to dollars.